Author: Ruby Campbell Stroschein and Janel Kelley Campbell

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2020-03-28

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1950294021

This book is a memoir of Janel Campbell who lost her mother when she was eleven years old. Woven through her own stories, Janel gives the backdrop of her mother's life in the high mountain desert plains of southeast Idaho, her marriage to Curtis Campbell, and the events that take her mother from the dry farm in Juniper, Idaho to Los Angeles, back to north Utah, to Seattle, back to Utah, then to New Jersey, and back to Kent, Washington, a path that eventually leads to her mother's brutal murder on March 8, 1961 at the young age of 39. Mary Kelley Campbell was a witty, high-spirited Irish girl who lost her own father at the age of six, raised by her widowed mother, older sisters, and brother. Mary was a devout Mormon, a compassionate Christian, and the mother of six children. The confessed murderer was a member of Mary's church, a Lennie-type Of Mice and Men; a large, strong, lumbering, simple-minded man oblivious of his actions and desperate to please. The helpless 22-year-old confesses to have been hypnotized by a young attractive member of their church, who he claims was obsessed with the idea of having Mary killed and taking her place as the wife of an eminent Boeing engineer. The crime was labeled by King County prosecutors as "...one of the weirdest murders in the annals of the Pacific Northwest." With Mary's legacy banished for nearly sixty years by the pain and circumstance of her death, Janel has quelled the fears she knew she had to face in order to bring her mother's tales of betrayal, heartache, love, and forgiveness to Mary's progeny, and to the world.